Ask a minister in a European Union government what post their country hopes to get in the next European Commission, and the response is the same every time – something important to do with the economy. Well, you can’t blame people for not hurrying to step into the shoes of Leonard Orban, the Romanian commissioner for multilingualism.
On the other hand, there aren’t enough top economic jobs for Commission president José Manuel Barroso to satisfy everyone. Truth to tell, the Commission looks too big with 27 members. But that’s the way it is, and that’s the way it will stay under the EU’s Lisbon treaty. A guaranteed seat on the Commission seems a simple, visible way of making a country’s citizens feel connected to the EU.
The main four economic portfolios in Barroso’s outgoing Commission have been – in no particular order – competition, the internal market, trade, and economic and monetary affairs. These have been occupied by the Netherlands, Ireland, Britain and Spain respectively. By contrast, France has held two lesser posts (first transport, then justice, freedom and security), and Germany has dropped almost completely out of sight in the post of enterprise and industry.
As Barroso puts together his new team, France and Germany are in the hunt for really big jobs and feel no doubt that they deserve them because of their relatively diminished status in the outgoing Commission. The French and Germans want to play a much more direct role in shaping the EU’s economic and financial policies as the EU struggles to emerge from recession, rewrites its rules on financial regulation and defends its industries in world markets. France is said to desire the internal market job on the Commission, and Germany would like something equally prominent.
All this is causing some nervousness in Britain and a few like-minded countries that the next Commission will be less free market-oriented than its predecessor. In response I would make two points. First, this is the spirit of the age – you can expect nothing less after the recent near-meltdown of the western world’s financial system and the associated regulatory failures.
But secondly, it just does not follow that to give a top economic dossier to France or Germany means that the Commission will be wrenched in the direction of some manically illiberal étatisme and fiendishly pro-Volkswagen industrial policy. To take one excellent example, Pascal Lamy, the Frenchman who served as trade commissioner from 1999 to 2004, was a robust defender of free trade and now is head of the World Trade Organisation. The same would be true if the next French commissioner were someone like Christine Lagarde, who at present is President Nicolas Sarkozy’s finance minister (she is still a possible choice, some think, even though it looks as if Sarkozy is going for Michel Barnier).
EU commissioners, at their best, are like US Supreme Court justices. When a president picks a judge to sit on America’s highest court, everyone’s first thought is, “Here we go, a blatant political appointment designed to push the Court in a certain ideological direction”. Then, more often than not, the nominee causes a surprise by putting the court’s interests first and acting independently. So it can be at the Commission, where the institutional culture of independence from political pressure is stronger than many on the outside assume.
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